A technician or a field operator, e.g. in a process plant, manufacturing installation, at off-shore oil and gas platform or at an electrical power transmission or distribution installation or substation, needs to check on alarms and other events reported by a control system, as well as interact with systems or devices in the installed equipment on a daily basis. An operator also has to have access to information and documentation about the process(es) and the installed equipment. However various user interfaces, both physical and software interfaces, for the installed equipment, operating devices and for one or more supervisory control systems and so on are often designed differently so that the field operators have to learn how to use a multitude of different user interfaces. The different equipment interfaces may also often be inconsistent with respect to each other.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,032,978 to Westinghouse, entitled Status tree monitoring and display system describes a display, a display method and an apparatus are disclosed which produce a summary display depicting function states using discrete state bars centered in one window of a two-window display. The display is presented to solve a problem that in many complex processes, the operator is confronted with a vast amount of information that must be analyzed before appropriate action can be taken.
The field operator, as well as interacting with installed equipment or devices or systems, needs access to documentation of some kind, which may be a manual, historical data, maintenance history & repair reports and the like. Even though the trend is that parts of such documentation has become electronically available, it is often stored in different systems and at different locations. Therefore, the field operators either have to plan information gathering for their work tasks in advance, or they have to interrupt ongoing tasks in order to find and then access support information and documentation for the installed equipment, process or device. In addition, the process of obtaining information about an alarm or about a device may take considerable time, and may require that an operator browses through many databases. A considerable amount of time may be necessary to search by name or system identification for information about a device or process. In critical or emergency situations, it is very important to obtain relevant technical information quickly to avoid material damage to plant to process as well as possible injury to persons in the plant.